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Tuesday, June 21, 2011

This past week on my way home from work I decided to stop by our university meat market and get something to barbecue for Father's Day. It was the end of the week and day so not much was left but I did get some ribs and cute little quail eggs! I was really excited about the eggs, not so much for eating (I didn't know what to expect as far as taste!) but for how I could use them for decorating! The eggs were just so tiny and cute with their little speckles :o)

They came as a flat of 50 eggs so now I had to figure out what to do with all those eggs!

And for comparisons sake I didn't have a regular chicken egg but I did have an egg candle that is the approximate size :o)

I decided to take half along to my parents' house to make some deviled Quail eggs for our Father's Day bbq. I just boiled the eggs for a few minutes, removed the shell (this took a while with so many tiny eggs!) and popped out the yolks into a small bowl. I then mixed the yolks with some mayonnaise, mustard, sweet pickle relish and salt to taste. I transferred the filling to a ziplock bag that I cut a hole in one end and piped the filling into the egg whites. And a sprinkle of paprika and voila!

And they tasted just like chicken eggs, though they seemed a bit fancier. For some reason smaller food just seems fancier :o)

So for the rest of the eggs:

I had saved the prettiest ones for decorating purposes. And I finally bought some chicken eggs so now we have a true size comparison:

I decided to blow the yolk and whites out of the shell, trying to keep the shell intact. I used a pin to poke a hole in both ends of the egg and then blew the contents into a bowl which I later used to make scrambled eggs. Be careful at this step as eggs can have Salmonella. There are different suggestions online about how to go about blowing out the eggs. I just washed the eggs first with dish soap and hoped for the best, but you can use a tiny straw or other methods (I didn't think to read up on this until after I was all done!) But then again I love raw cookie dough..........

I used a few eggs to replace the plastic eggs I had on the display stand I made a while back

And here it is with the new eggs, I just love the speckle variation of the quail eggs:

Here you can see a little more of the stand:

For the rest of the eggs I was thinking of putting several on display in a shadow box. We'll see what I come up with for the other ones!